Watch now: 'Peter Joseph: The Border Paintings' exhibition walkthrough

16 February 2021

On the occasion of Peter Joseph's second exhibition at Lisson Gallery in New York, and his fourteenth with the gallery in total, this narrated exhibition walkthrough guides us through the breadth of Joseph's painting practice: from his abandonment of a career in advertising to focus solely on painting in the late 1950s, and early works influenced by American Abstraction, to the aesthetic epiphany that would come to define several bodies of work and, eventually, the Border Paintings, from the early 1970s onward.

The seminal moment for Joseph’s practice came during a visit to the cinema when, due to a projector fault during a screening, the artist remained in the theatre for some time, bathed in the residual light of the projector on the silver screen. Joseph sat staring at this blank space, the flickering void of the empty projection surrounded by a darker border delineating the cinematic frame. This experience inspired the nuanced relationship of light and color between a border and a central motif that would come to define his oeuvre for many decades to come, containing what he described, in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, as “a delicacy about it. It wasn’t just a simple tone or color. And I realized that this, to me, had more possibility in it for what I could only call a reflection.”

'Peter Joseph: The Border Paintings' is on view from 16 February to 24 April at Lisson Gallery 504 West 24th Street location.